


they call me noah

by psychamonia



Series: 'they call me' verse [2]
Category: Lunch Club, The Lunch Club Podcast, Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Backstory, Family, Leaving Home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-07-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:34:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25291744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psychamonia/pseuds/psychamonia
Summary: Ever since Noah was old enough to know the limits of his small world, he’s wanted to leave it.---Noah's origins in the 'they call me' universe.
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s)
Series: 'they call me' verse [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1832230
Comments: 1
Kudos: 36





	they call me noah

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is related to a longer work ("they call me the hero") and serves as backstory for Noah. It can be read on its own, but I would recommend checking out the parent work, as it may provide necessary context!
> 
> (if you don't feel like reading 11,000 words of context, all you should need to know is that it's post-apocalyptic, people have superpowers, and there are altered human/monster creatures called the Stal)
> 
> Enjoy!

Ever since Noah was old enough to know the limits of his small world, he’s wanted to leave it. 

Even on the days when he sits on the stoop of his family’s back porch, drinking in the last of the evening sunlight settling across the horizon. Even when he takes a break in the heat of the baling days, when the hay sticks to the sweat on his forearms and he can just hear the shouts of his little siblings echoing up from the creek. Even when he first enters the crumbling pre-war house on the edge of their property and sits in its shadow, feeling the cold imprint of times long past. 

The place has history tied into every inch of it, woven deep into the fabric of the fields. His family has been farmers since before the wars, before even the sparkling cities of the pre-war world were built. The way his dad tells it, they’ve been farmers since the beginning of time, when Jesus was the only Power to walk the earth, and Satan the only antiPower. And Noah wouldn’t need much convincing to truly believe it. 

His family was made for this life; this simple, familiar life. He can see it in his dad’s wide smile as he ruffles Noah’s hair, as he climbs beaming into their last tractor, still barely struggling along on the ebbing Power left inside its engine by Noah’s uncle, dead in a land skirmish years ago. ( _The first Powered in the entire village,_ his dad says proudly.) He sees it in the quiet calm of the kitchen in the mornings, the honey-gold color of his mother’s bread cooling on the counter. He sees it in the mud streaked across his siblings’ hands and faces and ankles, and in the brightness of their eyes when they hang off the rusting metal fences of the pastures. 

He doesn’t see it in his own eyes, staring into the dusty mirror hanging crookedly in the mud room. He doesn’t feel it in the strength of his hands as he pumps another bucket of water, or in the exhausted satisfaction of a day’s work finally done. He doesn’t hear it in the lowing of the cows as he settles into his bed. And so, even when he thinks of his family, his friends, the hills and fields and streams he’s known for his entire life- even then, he wants to go. 

Noah isn’t stupid. He knows that the world is dangerous. They lose cattle to rogue bandits and wild animals often. Their village suffered through the worst days of the Stal attacks. They’ve had enough problems to know that most visitors are more trouble than they’re worth.

What Noah hopes is that maybe, just maybe, the world is beautiful, too. And that thought is enough to tip the scale, to turn the familiar comforts of home restricting and tiresome and _wrong,_ at least for him.

So when the next trade caravan passes through their tiny town center, barely more than an old re-fitted farmhouse, he signs on. 

By then, he’s explored his power, spent many a day in the hot, cramped room where he sleeps, opening and closing the attic door, living in the in-between space he creates with his own hands and mind. He trains himself, knowing all the while that if he stays, he will never get to use it. There’s no place for interdimensional portals in their modest, three-farm village. A talent like his father’s, growing impossible plants to impossible standards, or like his dead uncle’s, breathing life into broken and useless things, would have had a place. Even his mother, with a Power as mundane as always knowing the hour without consulting the sky, has a place in the fields, calling in the workers when leisure time begins. 

So Noah signs onto the caravan, and he prepares to leave. He takes his time in saying goodbye, breathing in the stuffy heat of his bedroom, watching the dappled sunlight through the forest, feeding the calves at daybreak with his sisters. In the attic, he opens his portal one more time and leaves his bags right inside the door. He tells his father that it might be time to start training his younger brother in the fields. He tells his mother that he loves her. 

He does not tell anyone that he is leaving. 

And one morning, when the sun breaks cleanly over the horizon and the morning fog hovers low over the fields, Noah leaves his home behind.


End file.
